Happy New Year

To every one of the people who was accidentally or on purpose was behind the 90,000 or so hits H.o.t.E. has had during 2011.  I hope you find the site equally interesting in 2012 when it will, I expect, remain as controversial as ever - if perhaps in a more judiciously-expressed fashion.  Certainly I don't intend to let up on my exposure and critique of hypocrisy and humbug among the undeservedly over-privileged.  If this means more criticism of the moral and intellectual laziness of past and present products/members of what will henceforth be referred to here as The Old Boys High School, well so be it.

Good King Chilperic? (again)

Chilperic and Fredegund

About ten years ago I wrote a piece about Gregory of Tours and Chilperic I of Neustria - usually regarded as Gregory's model 'bad king':

‘Nero and Herod? The death of Chilperic and Gregory of Tours’ writing of history.’ The World of Gregory of Tours, ed. K. Mitchell and I.N. Wood, (Brill; Leiden, 2002), pp.337-50. ISBN 90-04-11034-8.

Here I argued that the negative image of Chilperic belongs entirely to Histories 6.46 and after, in other words to the portion written during the supremacy of Guntramn of Burgundy of whom, I argued, Gregory really was afraid.  Before 6.46, Gregory's image of Chilperic is fairly positive; he criticises and praises in a broadly consistent fashion.

Anyway, be all that as it may, today I was looking at this post in Steve Muhlberger's excellent blog and as a result (and also because, as luck would have it, the MGH edition of Gregory's Histories was open at more or less exactly the right page on my desk) I had another look at Histories 7.2.  This is a hugely interesting passage for all sorts of reasons, such as the fighting between the men of Blois, Chateaudun, Orleans and Chartres (which I think is a part of Guntramn grabbing a piece of the newly deceased Chilperic's kingdom, but let's leave that to one side for now).  What caught my attention was the opening phrase, and the accompanying note in Krusch and Levison's edition:

Defuncto igitur Chilperico inventamque tam diu quesierat mortem ... (Chilperic thus having died, having found the death which he had sought so long...)

Now, Thorpe's (in)famous Penguin classics translation renders this as 'No sooner was Chilperic dead, he having met the fate for which he had been asking so long..."  This isn't a bad rendition and once again we would seem to have more evidence of the outpouring of venom which some have thought Gregory now felt he could write, his 'pet hate' (in Wallace-Hadrill's words) being dead - or as I would (have) prefer(ed) - an attention-grabbing but superficial phrase condemning the Neustrian king, but written to appease Guntramn. 

However, Krusch and Levison's note 3 refers to S. Hellmann comparing the Latin with the Book of Revelation (or the Apocalypse of John) 9.6: Et in diebus illis quaerent homines mortem et non inveniant eam (And in those days men will seek death and they will not find it).  The idea that Gregory had this phrase in mind when he wrote this passage seems reasonable but if it was a deliberate evocation of that passage then more reflection is worthwhile and interesting.  The next sentence of Revelation says something like 'men will desire death but death will fly from them' - all this being in the context of huge locusts being released after the breaking of the fifth seal, and these locusts being tasked with torturing men but not killing them.  Indeed, just before Chilperic's death, Gregory says a huge plague of locusts descended on part of Gaul (Histories 6.44)...  But let us think on.  Here we have locusts terrorising Gaul and a verbal invocation of the Book of Revelation and the torturing of men.  However, Chilperic finds the death he sought.  Does this actually mean that Chilperic was released from the torments of life?  I think it is worth pondering whether Gregory's phrase, which looks superficially like a condemnation of the dead king (and I assume was meant to look that way) was, again, a covert phrase of - if not praise - then at least of more neutral thinking about the old rascal.  I think Gregory had come to think that Chilperic was not all bad, or at least that he had been savable (compare his vision of the dead king in Book VIII).  Possibly there is a hint of melancholic reflection on the murdered king here?

Germanist Quote of the Week #1

"The irresponsible, and more than despotic authority vested by the Roman laws in the father over the son, was thoroughly repugnant to the Visigothic conception of justice and freedom, which had been transmitted through many generations of barbarian ancestors."
From S.P. Scott's* notes to his translation of the Visigothic Forum Iudicum.  Hurrah for S.P.!  I expect this sort of thing is still taught at Strand Community College.

* His real name as I am sure his heirs and assigns are unlikely to sue...

A Change of Practice

Yesterday I was sent (by this blogger) an interesting piece about English law as it relates to blogging (here).  So, to avoid any further run-ins with the authorities, potential embarrassments to my kindly employers and so on, outside my formal academic pieces (articles, lecture scripts, etc.), in ‘discursive’ posts no personal names will henceforth be employed.  Instead a system of links and allusions will have to suffice.  Over time, with luck, this will evolve into a complex code which only H.o.t.E. aficionados will understand and be able to employ.  This will consequently turn this site into an unholy on-line fusion of Private Eye and a kind of Virtual Oxbridge High Table.  This, naturally, as it doesn't take a genius to figure out, represents the pinnacle of all my secret, repressed desires.

A Query About the Socially-Embedded Economy

If I want to avoid the word 'gift' - because I don't think that the exchange of objects or food in return for alliance/service/reciprocal bestowals counts as a gift - what word could I use that would be better?  Any advice appreciated.  I haven't, btw, read the most recent Davies/Fouracre collaborative opus.

Whilst we're on the subject...

... Of being able to protest peacefully without being sabred by the yeomanry, you might be interested to read this quite worrying piece.  Worrying not least because the type of target that such weaponry would be useful against would not be rioters and looters but large fairly static crowds, like, say, anti-cuts or pro-public-sector-workers marches.

A Dark Day for British History

Here you can read about the University of Birmingham obtaining a court injunction criminalising any occupation or sit-in protest anywhere on its 250-acre campus during the next 12 months.  That's right.  A British University has outlawed peaceful protest on its grounds.  Leave aside, for a minute, the general implications of that - there are ample good points made in the article.  What this means is that at a time of unprecedented attacks on Higher Education students are barred by University management from making peaceful protest. 

Consider too, the historical struggle that people had to open up access to higher education in the UK; consider the historical struggles waged to earn British people the right to protest without getting sabred by the yeomanry.  Now consider the fact that the V-C of Birmingham University rose through the ranks as a historian.  I don't know whether he still thinks of himself as an historian; his profile makes scant mention of his historical credentials, except seemingly as a past phase he went through, and the only publications referred to are policy documents and speeches.

Whatever.  Speaking just for myself, if this report is accurate and if Birmingham's V-C is behind his University's legal actions - and it's difficult to believe that, as V-C, he isn't - then I think that, whether or not he does still think of himself as a historian (supremely ironically, one who used to teach Chartism and Marxist theory), his actions ought to shame the British academic historical profession.  In my own view, this would be a disgraceful thing for anyone to do at any time, but it is especially so during this year of all years. This year non-violent protests have occurred through the world and often been violently repressed.  Our governments have mouthed support for these protests and yet here we are, in the Free West, with a seat of learning threatening with the force of the law peaceful student protesters (protesting about issues that affect them, the future of UK Higher Education). 

My own view is that it is especially regrettable that a historian should be behind this - and, I assume, a pretty good historian too since he has a chair in the subject.  As I have argued repeatedly in this blog, there is an ethical demand at the core of historical research and I think it says nothing good when no attempt is made to bear that demand in the present, outside one's research into the safely dead past.  Having a historian behind it sheds a bad light on this affair not just because Birmingham's V-C knows about the events of nineteenth-century British social history, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists and the rest, but because I assume that he had to engage with the writings by and about those movements in what (as I have argued before) is inevitably a humane, ethical fashion.  That is why, as a professional historian, I feel ashamed that this action should have been taken by a fellow historian.  OK, I can imagine various scenarios in which a threat of legal action might be a useful negotiating point with protesters on campus and it's possible of course that the Guardian article hides some nuance of this sort, but whatever scenario I envisage in a UK university with UK students, all this looks horribly heavy-handed and unnecessary.

So, overall, I say to Birmingham's V-C shame on you.  Shame on you.  Perhaps you have been badly advised.  I hope you can see that this was a mistake, reconsider it and rescind this action as soon as you can.  Sheffield backed down on their similar injunction, after all.

Otherwise, pepper spray, anyone?